Unfortunately, Robert Kaplan's article, in the July/August 2003 Atlantic, is not reprinted on the magazine's Web site. It is a long piece, based mainly on conversations with U.S. special operations forces deployed at various hot spots around the globe. Special ops are very smart, very brave officers indeed; a few hundred in Iraq accomplished what a division of conventional Army troops might have managed; and when R.D. Kaplan discusses the role they play in 65 countries around the world, the piece is very interesting and instructive. But he goes overboard in gleaning a strategic philosophy from their tactical insights. He quotes one Green Beret, approvingly it seems: "I wish people in Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their system." Rule No. 6 in this article, indeed, is: "Bring Back the Old Rules"—that is, he elaborates, "the pre-Vietnam rules," the days of covert ops and black-bag regime change. In many respects, this article is reminiscent of the many casually overassured treatises, on all layers of armed conflict from counterinsurgency to limited-nuclear-war strategy, that appeared in great proliferation during the New Frontier days of the early '60s. R.D. Kaplan and many of the others are eerily reminiscent of Alden Pyle, the callow but ultimately sinister American idealist in Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, who dashed about the streets of Saigon, in the days before America's direct involvement, with a book called The Rise of the West tucked under his arm, and about whom Greene's narrator, the weary British journalist Thomas Fowler, said, "I have never known a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." R.D. Kaplan writes, "The old rules are good rules because, as the ancient Chinese philosophers well knew, deception and occasional dirty work are morally preferable to launching a war." True enough, but he sometimes writes as if all the world's disputes boil down to those two options. In at least one place, the author resorts to sheer fantasy:

Impending technologies, such as bullets that can be directed at specific targets the way larger warheads are today, and satellites that can track the neuro-biological signatures of individuals, will make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat.

I really wonder who fed him this malarkey. There may be (may be) some low-level research into such possibilities, in the same way that there are probably crumblike projects investigating telepathy and teleporting, but there is nothing—nothing—in these realms that are remotely so advanced as to be labeled "technologies," much less "impending."